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Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

The Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health: Exaggerating the evidence for acupuncture to make it appear to be more than an elaborate placebo

The Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health is a group dedicated to promoting “integrative medicine” in medical academia that has, unfortunately, been very successful over the last two decades. Recently, it published a report that promotes acupuncture as a tool to combat the opioid epidemic Let’s just put it this way. The ACIMH exaggerates the evidence rather obviously.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

No, antivaccine quack Mark Geier has not been exonerated, but the Maryland Board of Physicians appears to have screwed up

Autism quack Dr. Mark Geier recently won a $2.5 million judgment against the Maryland Board of Physicians for having violated his medical privacy by including the name of a drug he was taking in a public cease-and-desist order. Antivaxers are trying to spin this as some sort of vindication of his antivaccine quackery. Make no mistake, the board appears to have screwed up, but that has nothing to do with whether its revocation of Geier’s medical license was justified.

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Clinical trials Integrative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

More on the funding of acupuncture quackery by Medicaid

A few weeks ago, I described how acupuncture advocates appeared to have successfully snookered the Ohio Medicaid program into funding the quackery that is acupuncture for Medicaid recipients. Now, they’re poised to go beyond Ohio

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Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Got diarrhea? The latest trend in fashionable nonsense is “raw water”

In pseudoscience, appeals to nature are everywhere. It’s not surprising, then, that there is profit to be made selling “raw” (i.e., untreated) water at very high prices for its nonexistent health benefits, those benefits all claimed to be due to the “naturalness” of the water. I can’t help but note that cholera, Giardia, amoebic dysentery, and a wide variety of waterborne illnesses prevented by modern water treatment techniques are all very, very “natural.”

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

The Mayor of Algonac responds to a hepatitis A outbreak by promoting antivaccine pseudoscience

Southeast Michigan is currently in the midst of a hepatitis A outbreak that started in August 2016. In Algonac, a small town in the Thumb region, the mayor decided to help a restaurant whose business suffered when one of its new staff members under training caught hepatitis A. Unfortunately, the form that help took was to host an antivaccine propaganda meeting.